The last three weeks have been one of the most awesome times of my life. But I had little time for blogging.
University end of trimester crunch plus exams meant little to no time to work on things I had aimed for. And, I also had the opportunity to head to China to work at Inner Mongolia Normal University (IMNU) on game development – a tremendous opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.
Game Development in Inner Mongolia
So I spent the greater part of three weeks in Hohhot, the capitol city of Inner Mongolia working with other students doing game development at the IMNU campus.
We had a lot of time in the first few days to explore Hohhot and the surrounding area. We left Melbourne on a beautiful 10 degree day in winter to a summer in central China with the average temperature of 33 degrees.
Hohhot is not a large city in China or a place that usually has a lot of tourists, but it was an absolutely beautiful place to visit.
All of the people were friendly the food was absolutely delicious and super cheap, my standard breakfast was doufu nao (豆腐脑) and youtiao (油条).
We spent time doing different activities before we started on the game development including Mongolian archery, taijiquan (太极拳) and even had the chance to dress up in traditional Mongolian garb. So many opportunities to do things, and we all loved every minute of it.
Soon enough we had to get down to working with the local students to develop their concepts, including some absolutely amazing artwork, into apps and games.
My group worked on an app to represent the Chinese mid-autumn festival especially around mooncakes and Chang’e, the goddess of the moon.
We created an app named MoonCakes which was written in Unity. I assisted in the application development with Harry Martin, and Brian Lam adding the additional 3D assets.
The girls from IMNU providing the art assets with Wang Mengqi creating the design as well as the art direction, animations from Song Yuting and Liang Meng provided the UI assets.
It was an absolute wonderful experience and being able to create an awesome application at the same time as spending time in a new country and meet some awesome people has been a dream come true.
If you do ever get the chance to visit China, make sure Hohhot is on your places to visit.
